The DIPLOMAT rapid-deployment

speech translation system is intended to allow naive users to communicate across a language barrier, without strong do-main restrictions, despite the error-prone nature of current speech and translation technologies. Achieving this ambitious goal depends in large part on allowing the users to interactively correct recognition and translation er-rors. We briefly present the Multi-Engine Machine Translation (MEMT) architecture, describing how it is well-suited for such an application. We then describe our incorporation of interac-tive error correction throughout the sys-tem design. We have already developed a working bidirectional Serbo-Croatian English system, and are currently de-veloping Haitian-Creole ~ English and Korean ~ English versions. 1 In t roduct ion The DIPLOMAT project is designed to explore the feasibility of creating rapid-deployment, wear-able bi-directional speech translation systems. By "rapid-deployment", we mean being able to de-velop an MT system that performs initial trans-lations at a useful level of quality between a new language and English within a matter of days or weeks, with continual, graceful improvement to a good level of quality over a period of months. The speech understanding component used is the SPHINX II HMM-based speaker-independent con-tinuous peech recognition system (Huang el al., 1992; Ravishankar, 1996), with techniques for rapidly developing acoustic and language models for new languages (Rudnicky, 1995). The ma-chine translation (MT) technology is the Multi-Engine Machine Translation (MEMT) architec